Our surprise anniversary trip destination is...

Nov 27, 2013

I can hardly contain my excitement as we sit at the airport waiting to the board a plane that is heading to a city we've been wanting to visit for years. 
Our love for the pacific northwest is rather intense, and I just know this city is going to blow my mind.
No expectations though, right?
Josh is the greatest.
I don't know much about his plans, but I do know that we will have a rental car.
I'm hoping this means we can venture outside of the city a little bit to see what all Oregon has to offer.
Please let me know if you have any recommendations or must-sees for the area!

An Icy weekend

Nov 26, 2013

Even though the silly weatherman predicted ice/snow storms to come through north Texas last weekend, my parents still made the drive to come visit us.
Thank goodness.
You know it was a big deal when they missed out on Sunday Whiskey Cake brunch so they could get back due to the supposed "weather".
Of course, nothing happened.
We hardly even got rain.
Regardless of our lack of snow, we still endured some harsh conditions on Saturday by going to the Gaylord Texan Hotel to see their Ice! production.
Each year they transform over two million pounds of ice into themed, lit sculptures.
We've been wanting to go for years, and this year it finally worked out that we were able to.
This year's theme was The Nutcracker!
We couldn't convince Josh to come, but we had a blast anyways.
They give you cute little parkas to wear in the rooms (thank goodness because it was a whopping 8 degrees in there!)
I only had to knock down three little kids to ride the ice slide.
Randomly, they also had another room of sculptures this year themed "Christmas in New York"
Lady Lib looked weird.
We did love the ice taxi though.
. . . and of course the John Lennon Central Park tribute!
The boys spent the afternoon watching football, while mom and I went shopping and warmed up with some Starbucks.
I do realize that taking a "red cup pic" is about the most cliche thing to do right now as an instagrammer and blogger, but look at that lighting and the creme brûlée sprinkles!
That's photo worthy.
Thank goodness the boys pulled themselves together enough to make it to dinner at Mexican Sugar with the fam.
Isn't our little neighborhood the cutest at Christmas?
I patiently waited for snow all day Sunday.
Nothing.
Sunday morning Charles snuggles are probably my favorite thing in the world.
Isn't that what people say about their kids?
Awkward.
We capped off the chilly weekend in the perfect way:
Pulling out the Christmas dishes to fill them with homemade potato soup! 
I could eat soup for every meal if Josh would let me.
Do you have a favorite winter dish?

...that time Josh made our apartment into a food truck

Nov 25, 2013

One night, following a particularly brutal day of work, I came home to find that Josh had turned our apartment into my favorite food truck.
It already thrills me when Josh makes dinner, but when he puts this much effort into it I realllllllly loose my marbles.
Greatest guy ever, amiright?
We are both pretty addicted to the incredible sliders from the Easy Slider food truck in Dallas.
He made a menu and even included the little skewers in the sliders! 
My favorite was the Sweet & Low Down (cream cheese, strawberry jam, bacon)
I'm quite the lucky gal.
As for Charles, not so much.

Life Update {via Instagram}

Nov 22, 2013

I've been rather sporadic with the blogging lately, so to keep you updated with all the latest and greatest happenings in our always eventful lives, I'll give you a quick overview
(or you can just follow me on instagram @em_kerrigan to keep up with it all in real time)
Let's start with the worst news first:
I burnt pralines.
I didn't know it was possible, and my mom is probably mortified, but it happened and I'm ashamed.
Black as tar, y'all.
Halloween morning, Josh left some very important jewelry on the coffee table.
Apparently, he wanted to be single for Halloween.
I fell in love with some vintage glasses, and the was gifted them for my birthday.
Fun fact: I was told they used to come in oatmeal boxes in the 40's?
We became an Aunt and Uncle!!
Josh's brother and his wife gave birth to the sweetest, most beautiful baby in the world, Abram
On that note, Josh held a baby for the first time and this is how Abram felt about it.
I finally completed our wedding album.
I completely customized the template myself via Artifact Uprising, and stressed over it for 4-5 months.
Josh snap chatted himself wearing a red scrub cap not realizing he looked like BoZo's long lost twin brother. 
Our favorite restaurant in Dallas, Whiskey Cake, opened a sister restaurant Mexican Sugar (which is conveniently walking distance from our apartment).
We've been waiting months to try it, and somehow we beat the crowds and caught a soft opening.
Our minds were blown.
If Whiskey Cake and Velvet Taco had a fancy love child, this would most definitely be it. 
OH, and in other food news . . . 
We had our first crawfish of the season. 
Hallelujah.
I love following new people on Instagram! 
If I don't already follow you, leave your username below and I'd love to add you!

Anniversary Celebrations

Nov 20, 2013

Our anniversary weekend started off like this.
I'm pretty sure I experienced what death feels like and I'm gonna go ahead and blame it on Obamacare (or my flu shot).
Either way, I was out for the count and slept for about 34809238490328 hours.
I was magically revived by four fantastic slices of heaven brought to me by the greatest husband of all time.
We ate them too fast to take photos, but take my word for it, each and every bite was magical.
Emporium Pies is the bomb.com (particularly Cloud Nine: butterscotch pudding with caramel and brown sugar meringue)

Sunday (our anniversary) I woke up feeling brand new.
It was one of the most refreshing mornings ever, actually.
We had the door wide open all day because the weather was incredible.
I had home-made blueberry muffins in the oven and iced coffee in my mug while our favorite vinyls were spinning on the record player.
I wrote one of the most heartfelt blog posts of my life (here)
Call me dramatic, but it really was a perfect day.

Even though this perfect day consisted of 85 degree weather, we decided to start a new tradition by putting up Christmas decorations every year on our anniversary.
Sorry Thanksgiving.
We exchanged gifts, and I was finally able to reveal to Josh the project I've been working on for three long months.
I had full intentions of making a photo album/scrapbook of our first 52 weeks of marriage using the Project Life packages.
For some reason I heavily underestimated the time involved in this project and I was only able to complete 8 weeks, but hey, he loved it.
More on that coming to the blog soon.
Even though Josh is planning a top-secret anniversary trip, he still grabbed a few really thoughtful gifts for me (and a fantastic card)
Remember how awesome our wedding cakes were?
Go here in case you don't.
Well they were a little less awesome a year later.
We opted out of attempting to eat these disgusting specimens of one year old wedding cake
 My aunt made the pound cake at our wedding, and my sweet mom got her recipe and mailed us a fresh one to eat for our anniversary.
 I attempted some homemade icing and made a cake topper since I left our original one in Louisiana.
(Thanks Pinterest)
Thankfully, I had a co-worker cover call for me so I could enjoy three stress free hours to celebrate our anniversary over dinner. 
We loved Meddlesome Moth so much, we decided to go back! 
Would you believe I've been married to that stud for a year now?
Me neither.

A little lesson on expectations

Nov 18, 2013

Having expectations was a huge theme in our relationship my brain before we got engaged.
I had been “expecting” Josh to propose for months.
Nine long, excruciating months.
(You can read more about the proposal and the waiting game here).
Thanks a whole heck of a lot movies and magazines and Nicholas Sparks for contributing to expectations when it comes to proposals.
Nevertheless, I survived and my patience paid off.
Before we got married, I was warned by a friend to try to go into to marriage with no expectations.
No truer words have ever been spoken.
Looking back on that advice now, I'm so appreciative of it.
Controlling my expectations has been the life lesson of our first year of marriage.
As hard as I tried not to, I still had a lot of expectations going into marriage.
I expected to be cooking homemade dinners every night.
That's what good wives do, right?
Even our pre-marriage book made us discuss that topic and we agreed that we would only go out to eat twice a week.
HAH.
I started off the year cooking often (because I was an unemployed housewife for two months, remember?)
Upon settling into our new jobs I didn't calculate for us both getting home at 6:00 most days and being entirely too drained to even consider cooking dinner, much less cleaning dishes.
Insert nightly pizza night here + freshman 15 all over again.

I also expected dust to just disappear on its own
. . . but I think that was just wishful thinking.

I expected us to have a billion new friends.
Well, we have made friends, we are just biased to our old friends.
When our friends come to town, which is more often that I expected, thank goodness, we go out; we just don't necessarily have the desire to go out and meet new people.
When we are sitting at home on a weeknight, drained from work and drained from slaving over a hot stove ;) we also don't have the desire to go out and meet new people.
Who would really wanna be friends with two newlyweds who play hide and go seek with their dog and go to bingo weekly, lets be honest.
I am thankful that Josh's new job has put him in contact with a lot of people our age and in our area, who are slowly but surely becoming potentially great friends.
I expected us going to church every Sunday.
Isn't that what newlyweds do? 
Go to church and have small groups and stuff.
The hard part is that we are never, ever in town on the weekends, unless I'm on call.
The fact that we haven't fully settled into a church has been gnawing at the back of my mind lately.
 It's on the to-do list. 

With us both having good jobs, I expected us to have a surplus of funds.
 I never-ever thought we would have to say, "Oh no, we are gonna have to wait a few years to go on that trip to Africa" or "We should wait a while to buy that king size bed."
Ironically, we tried a new church out earlier this year and on the first Sunday Dave Ramsey was starting a new series.
How crazy right?
It couldn't have been more perfect timing.
My favorite part from his sermon was that you've got to come to the understanding that your money is not yours.
It is God's and he blessed you with it, so you can't be selfish or stupid with it.

With that being said, I never expected us to have to cut down on the traveling.
Now, we have been pretty well-traveled over the last year.
Our bank account makes that quite evident, but if we are ever going to consider saving enough to mayyyyybe own a house one day then we've gotta stomp that annoying travel bug.
Who really wants a house though? 
I want Canada.

I never expected to want a king size bed, but that's really all I ever think about.
Then I think about the fact that that would require all new bedding, and then I think about that the only bedding I want is from Anthropologie, so there goes two bazillion dollars.
Sleeping with two hairy dudes is a challenge, I tell ya, but well worth two bazillion dollar bedding, right?

I also didn't expect how much I would look forward to getting home from work everyday to spend quality time with these guys.
I thought that the luster would wear off and that I would get annoyed by living with a messy guy and a dirty dog after a while.
False.
It's still just as fun and exciting as it was this time last year, if not more.
Having expectations can send you down two different paths: devastation or getting what you want.
Now, not getting what I want tends to bring out my innermost brat, so it is most likely in your benefit (and the benefit of others) to go into everything with no expectations at all.
There's no way to get let down without any expectations, right?

Our first year of marriage has taught me a lot about myself and dealing with others.
Things may not turn out how you expect them to, but that's ok.
I can't control everything, and things don't have to turn out any certain way.
Throughout this year, Josh has taught me so much about patience and understanding.
I've got a long ways to go in that department, but so far I think the greatest thing about being married is the realization that I am not in this alone.

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